Novel Approaches To Exercise

This year I’m going to get in shape, you told yourself. The mistake you made – that you keep making – is that you’re trying to make yourself jog, or ride a stationary bike, or do the same old boring and unpleasant sorts of exercise that you quit every damn time. Wouldn’t one of these options be more fun?

1. Yoga with Cats

Possibly you’ve tried a yoga routine at home and been interrupted by your pets. The solution is to incorporate your pet into the yoga routine.

Quidditch is a lot more fun if you have a flying broom, of course, but until working models are available for order, there’s muggle quidditch.

Played for years at the college level, the collegiate players are now graduating and bringing quidditch with them. FYI, the “snitch” is a sprinter in a yellow suit, so the quidditch match ends with everyone running after him.

3. Parkour and Freerunning

Parkour and freerunning have a number of health benefits. They involve running, strength training, a core workout, and fresh air. You also get to pretend you’re a ninja, a stunt man, or the superhero of your choice. This video has a number of helpful tips for beginners.

4. Roller skating.

Remember how much fun it was to roller skate as a kid? Thanks to the explosion of flat-track roller derby, you can now find high-quality skates (and outfit them with wheels for either indoor or outdoor terrain) in grownup sizes, as well as pads so that a fall on the sidewalk will not mean losing all the skin on your knees like it did when you were ten.

If you’d like to learn skating from a teacher, there are contact-free “Derby Lite” classes in many cities.

On the other hand, if you’d like the opportunity to hip-check your new roller skating friends, look for a recreational derby league in your town. Bonus: there is no other fitness routine out there that comes with a fun nickname, other than possibly LARPing.

5. Prancercise with Costumes

You may have heard of Prancercise, because the exercise that is “ideally induced by elation” went viral a few years ago.

However! You may not have realized that it is also possible to do Prancercise in costume. Or possibly this guy isn’t in costume, but is actually Thor.

6. Swim like a Mermaid

The fact is, costumes make lots of things more fun. If you’re doing the front crawl, swimming is pretty grueling, but what if you donned a mermaid tail rather than just a bathing suit?

If you order one of these, you’ll want both the monofin, so you can use it to actually swim, and a tail, because come on, the point here is swimming like a mermaid.

Warning: these tails will not actually let you breathe underwater like a real mermaid. It’s possible you could combine them with SCUBA equipment but I found no videos of people using SCUBA equipment and a mermaid tail simultaneously. You can also get a much fancier and more expensive silicon mermaid tails, including mermen tails and plus-sized tails.

7. Okay, we give up – costumes just make everything better!

You could run in a costume:

Bike:

Go bowling:

Little kids know: everything is better in a costume.

Maybe the proper outfit is really all you ever needed to stick with a workout routine?

Featured Image: “Muggle Quidditch Game in Vancouver 2” by Anton Bielousov